April, 2014

To the sane, she’s a potential money opponent for Ronda Rousey in a sea of female fighters who simply aren’t up to snuff. Holm is closer to Rousey athletically than most other women in MMA.

To the delusional, she’s the Woman to Beat Rousey™. This sentiment is great for selling a PPV, but let’s not kid ourselves. While Holm is head and shoulders above the division, Rousey is mountains above it.

Still, MMA fans like to speculate about such matters. And whenever a fighter like Holm wins a fighter–or a fighter like Cris Cyborg loses one…in a different sport–this speculation reaches a fever pitch.

Holm fought this past Friday at Legacy FC 30. Holm outclassed her opponent, Juliana Werner, throughout the fight and finished her off with a devastating head kick in the fifth round (check out the GIF via @ZProphet_MMA).

This is good news, isn’t it? Cyborg losing a Muay Thai fight erases all her credibility (we don’t actually think this but Dana White probably does), so Holm winning in such a devastating way must’ve impressed White, right?

Cheick Kongo failed to capture Vitaly Minakov’s Bellator heavyweight title at Bellator 115. The main event was, essentially, the only noteworthy fight on the card. It didn’t start out this way though. A welterweight tournament semfinal was supposed to take place as well, but Andrey Koreshkovsuccumbed to the flu. His fight against Sam Oropeza will be rescheduled.

A middleweight tournament semifinal bout was canceled as well. Jeremy Kimball couldn’t make weight against Dan Cramer. Not surprisingly, Bellator wasn’t able to salvage the card on such short notice. What we got was a patchwork card filled with one-off “feature fights” that meant nothing. In case you’re still interested, we’ve recapped it for you:

Despite the increasing amount of evidence that suggests it, we still aren’t buying into the idea that Gina Carano might actually return to MMA. We’ll continue to use her tentative connection to the sport as a justification to cover her burgeoning movie career, because deal with it, but the idea of seeing Carano return to the octagon, let alone against a legitimate killer in Ronda Rousey under the UFC banner? Come on, son.

During her recent appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, however, Carano hinted that a return to the ring (as it’s called in Long Island-based, high-end jewelry store commercials) is quickly becoming more than an outside possibility. In addition to telling Arsenio that she is meeting with Dana White and the UFC next week (!), Carano discussed how, despite her decision to initially step away from the sport, her passion for MMA never truly left. I can only assume that she simply neglected to mention “Except for those 5 minutes I spent in the cage with Cris Cyborg“:

There’s not a workout that I go through that I’m not fighting somebody in my mind and it’s never gone away. I love it. It’s something I can do that makes everything else disappear. I dream about it, I just didn’t know if I was ever going to get placed with the opportunity to make a comeback. So I’m either going to do it now or I’m gonna retire and say, ‘I’m never gonna do it.’ So now is the moment.

To recap: Arsenio Hall is still on TV, Gina Carano might fight again, and Robbie Lawler just narrowly fell short of capturing the welterweight title. In 2014. Where’s the reverse button on this time machine, amiright?

MMA veteran Drew Fickett is well known for his UFC battle with Karo Parisyan, for handing Josh Koscheck the first loss of his career inside the Octagon, and for the struggles with addiction that temporarily derailed his career (and likely contributed to his appearance on Judge Judy for standing on the hood of a car and chipping golf balls off of it). But most people don’t know that Fickett is also a music junkie and piano buff — spending up to an hour a day tickling the black and white keys with his knotted knuckles and arthritic fingers.

Drew’s fight nickname, “Nightrider,” is somewhat of a new addition. For most of his career, Fickett held the moniker of “Master,” which is more fitting for a pianist, if only indirectly. “Master” is the English equivalent of the Spanish word “maestro,” which is often bestowed upon great composers, or other artists. Seeing as though Drew has a tattoo that reads “Hecho en Mexico” on his shoulder — though he was really born in Columbia, South Carolina — it all seems to make a bit more sense. Or at least it does by Fickett’s own logic.

I first learned of Drew’s piano prowess when he and a few other fighters from my gym were helping me move an antique piano for my wife, who has played since she was a child. After contacting a man selling the piano on Craigslist, I showed up to the guy’s house with a group of fighters to help me move it, none of whom knew a thing about the instrument, let alone how to play one, or so I thought.

I looked at the piano like a monkey staring at a computer. I checked for visible damage, hit a couple of keys, and then asked the man if he’d take $50 less than what he was asking. He said, “No.” I told him I’d take it. Drew, unhappy with my negotiating skills, as well as my inability to distinguish the musical tool from a large paperweight, chimed in.

“Tino, you don’t know how to play?” Drew asked.

“No. Not at all,” I replied.

“What the hell were you thinking buying a piano without even knowing if it works?”

Drew then walked over to the piano, pulled out the bench, and sat down in front of it. Slumped over like Schroeder from the Charlie Brown cartoons, he proceeded to blow all of our minds with the melodic sounds of songs that were unfamiliar to any of us. After about two minutes he stood up, turned around, and nonchalantly said, “A couple of keys are out of tune, but it’s a great fucking piano.”

I’ve never been the type of guy to (openly) take pot-shots at Christianity, or any religion for that matter (diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, I always say), nor would I ever sit down with someone of faith and poke holes in the theology they believe to be concrete. As long as someone doesn’t force their religious beliefs upon you like fact, what harm can they really be doing? What I’m trying to say is, LEAVE TEBOW ALONE, YOU GUYS.

But this Fight Church thing, however, I just don’t know.

Oh, you haven’t heard about Fight Church? According to the film’s website, Fight Church is “a documentary about Christianity and fighting directed by Academy Award Winner Daniel Junge and Bryan Storkel.” More specifically, it’s a true story about a group of Christian ministers in New York that use MMA and kickboxing as a means to spread their message, and it comes with the nifty little tagline “Can you really love your neighbor as yourself and then punch him in the face?”

“This is my last fight,” the Janitor told Frank Trigg during an appearance on the “Toe to Toe With Trigg” interview show on MMAOddsbreaker earlier this week. “Doesn’t matter win or lose. That’s it. [I'll start] training people, there’s a possibility to open my own gym again. Or I could go the complete opposite direction and work the railroad. I’ll be happy just keeping myself busy.”

I’m going to call it right now: Matyushenko is going to lose to Beltran — not that it really matters, even to Matyushenko himself. (“Doesn’t matter win or lose.”) Remember last month when Cyrille Diabate announced his retirement before his fight against Ilir Latifi, and then got choked out without attempting a single significant strike? Diabate’s desire to win had already left him. He was just fulfilling an obligation. That’s basically what’s happening here with Matyushenko.

We weren’t the only ones left scratching our heads when it was announced that Dan Henderson and Daniel Cormier would meet at UFC 175. It’s not that we felt the fight is a squash match or anything, because Henderson’s victory over Mauricio Rua at Fight Night 38 proved that he is never one to be counted out entirely. It’s just that, well, up until the point that Hendo turned Rua’s nose into a pancake, he looked every bit as stiff and sluggish as one would expect a 43-year-old MMA fighter with nearly as many battles on his resume to look.

Couple Henderson’s recent performance(s) with the fact that Cormier is a much younger (in fight years, at least), stronger, and faster version of Rua, and that the matchup will serve as Henderson’s first sans-TRT, and you might begin to understand our surprise at the booking of this fight…

(And congrats to Bigfoot Silva vs. Mark Hunt for winning the play-in round by a landslide! Full results from that vote are here, if you’re curious. / Photo via Getty)

CagePotato is pleased to announce our “Greatest Fights in MMA History” tournament, where your votes will decide the #1 greatest MMA fight of all time, once and for all. Voting begins today with the round of 16, featuring a diverse selection of classic bouts from the last 15 years…

Here’s how it works: Select any of the matchups on the main bracket page to begin voting. A registration page will pop up, allowing you to login through Facebook (recommended) or create a new account. Go through each matchup and click on the fight you’d like to see advance to the next round. We’ve included video links and results for every fight on the matchup pages, so you can become re-acquainted before making your decision. Voting for the opening round ends Tuesday night at 11:59 p.m. ET. Visit our How-To page for the full voting schedule, which will run through April 22nd. Any questions or technical issues, please drop ‘em in the comments section on the bracket page.

For a while there, we here at CagePotato always just kind of assumed that Aleksander Emelianenko would spend the remainder of his days quietly crushing tomato cans and occasionally killing bears with knives. Until the day came 10 or so years from now, of course, when the Russian government would finally locate his geographically-isolated cabin and assign him one. final. mission. to save the world he gave up on so long ago. They’d say something like, “You’re a hard man to find,” and Aleks would be all like, “Not hard enough,” and before you know it, we’d have a movie franchise on our hands. Yeah, that’s how it’d go.

Unfortunately, it appears that the nightly bounties of delicious stabbed bear meat (second only to strangled boar meat on the list of manliest meals) and occasional espionage we had envisioned for Fedor’s little bro was only that: a dream. Last October, Aleks was detained after beating up a 63-year-old army veteran on his birthday (classy stuff, Al), and today brings word that Russia’s answer to War Machine has been placed on the country’s federal wanted list in light of another bizarre altercation:

Vladimir Markin, a spokesperson for the country’s Investigative Committee said that Emelianenko had been put on the federal wanted list as “he disappeared and did not appear for questioning at the scheduled time,” adding that charges were forthcoming.